The present invention relates to storage pools, and more specifically, to storage capacity allocation using distributed spare space.
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) arrays are known to have physical spares in the form of real disk drives that can be substituted into an array when a member of the array fails. If a RAID array is to be provided with maximum robustness, particularly in a setup where a number of physical drive maintenance sessions by a maintenance engineer is minimized, many spare drives may be provided in order to cover for multiple failures and a longer period of lights-off operation.
With increased size of data centers, even with the statistical reliability of modern drives, the sheer number of drives mean that efficiently managing drive failure and replacement is a big part of the total cost-of-ownership in large and distributed systems.